Whoever first said that loneliness is crippling was right on the money. It stops you in your tracks, takes everything out your hands and leaves you to burn, curling in at the edges with a hot sadness.

Contrary to popular belief, loneliness can strike anyone. A person who seems confident, a person in a loving relationship, a ‘popular’ person… it can chip away at their confidence, their self esteem, until they are unsure, sad, insecure, shrunken shrines to the people they remember once being. Those who are the best at hiding their loneliness often are the most scared of it. There’s not always a particular cause – though for some there is. For example: It can be exhausting to love somebody who you feel doesn’t love you nearly half as much as you love them. Whether this feeling has any truth to it or not, the mere nagging thought can rot you.

The loneliness within may crave more attention, more love but it also pushes it away -One word can tip you over the edge. But so can one silence; one missing response, one astray reassurance. It can be difficult to articulate. If only you could be more chill, less uptight- stop taking things to heart, so personally. But this is what the solitude has inspired. Someone looks at you the wrong way and you feel tears well, your throat ache with the anticipation of the out-pour from your eyes. Crying seems like a plausible solution, but sometimes you feel like crying and you can’t – which in ways is worse. You could be surrounded by people and still feel totally alone; In fact, sometimes being surrounded by people can reassert how deep, how close to the core your loneliness is. If anything it seems to prove your isolation, your alienation – you’re no longer part of the club – there’s no space for you, you don’t belong. Burrowing, gnawing, festering aloneness –– which I think is a much more accurate term for the feeling than loneliness, it seems to better summarise this lost singularity.

Guilt, isolation, jealousy, transparency, questioning your very existence, uncertainty, panic, alienation, incapability – a cocktail of undesirable emotions, a perfect recipe for all consuming self-loathing; A growing disillusionment with the world in general is alarming alone, but becoming disconnected to your self seems cause for a breakdown. A distinct feeling of otherness like a guest in your own body, your own mind. As if you’d been reassembled and nothing is quite where it should be, nothing quite fits. Plummeting self worth accompanies this punishing solitude – as if the tide is coming in when you’re stuck in a hole, making it harder and harder for you to pull yourself out, the sand walls changing under your grasp. I guess aloneness is like drifting out to sea. The current too strong, so you’re left floating aimlessly, being pulled to nothing and no one, helplessly drifting into immeasurable emptiness.

You read Murakami, Sputnik Sweethearts, and you relate so much it hurts your soul, but you don’t know what the answer is. Neither do I. I hope I find out soon. But maybe, just for now, its enough to know someone else feels this way too. In fact – you’re not alone.